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Your Views: Changing presidents doesnt alter flow of power

Letter to the editor

Updated:
Feb. 26, 2015, 1 a.m.

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Several years ago, I decided to try these new fluorescent bulbs that had caused such a fuss. So, the next bulb that went out at my house, I removed the old incandescent bulb and replaced it with the new experimental fluorescent bulb.

When I flicked the switch, the light came on, more or less exactly as it had done with the old bulb. As you can imagine, I was not very shocked by this.

Next year we will be electing a new president. You have undoubtedly all heard about this. Some are hoping for another Bush in the Oval Office. Some are supporting Hillary Clinton. Some are hoping that Scott Walker or Elizabeth Warren or Rand Paul will throw their proverbial hat in the ring.

As we prepare for another round of decimate-the-next-possible-leader-of-the-free-world, I would like to take a moment to remind everyone how this always turns out. In 2008, when Barack Obama was elected to our highest office, I had many friends who hailed the coming leader as the greatest president our country has ever known. They believed in hope and change. They believed that, together, “Yes, we can.”

Many of these friends are now not impressed and believe that our commander in chief should have achieved more in his six years in office. I also had friends on the other side of the two-party coin. They swore that Obama was the antichrist. They predicted that our greatest cities would either become modern-day Sodoms thanks to his loose liberal policies, or they would be reduced to rubble from unprotected terrorist attacks.

Their fears have not materialized just as the hopes of my liberal friends have not come to fruition. Obama did not, in most respects, behave differently from his predecessor. The reason for his similarity to the previous president is simple. George W. Bush and Obama are both plugged into the same source of power. Much like the incandescent and the fluorescent light bulbs, they are only instruments of that power.

These men are very different in their philosophies, but the political system through which they must work is the same. The reason liberals did not get the change they hoped for, and conservatives did not get the change they feared, is because the power structure remained unchanged.

At some point, our personal philosophies cease to matter, because our personal, and even worse, our collective voice, is not being heard. Perhaps it is time to not only change our leader’s name, but to change what our leader is.

Perhaps it is time to change more than the light bulb. Perhaps it is time to change power companies.